DISCLAIMER: As much as you may want to, please resist the urge to get prescriptive on me or Theo about anything after reading this. You may feel compelled to recommend probiotics or lavender or eliminating dairy or ask me if I’ve looked into X. Please don’t. Because 1) nothing is helpful in retrospect, and 2) I lived in this reality for MONTHS. If you thought about it after reading my experience, I promise you I did too. We looked into everything. We had everything checked. There were doctors and naturopaths and baby chiropractors in and out of our lives for months. There was nothing “wrong” with either of us (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you see it, haha). This was just a sucky chapter in our lives and we’re happy to have moved past it. Also, keep in mind that at the time of this post, I’m feeling much better. Let’s get into it. IN THE THICK OF IT“So do you love being a mom?” The first time I heard this was 5 weeks postpartum. I forced a smile at the barista who asked and politely replied, “absolutely,” before walking home to my perpetually screaming new baby. Later that same week I left Theo with my husband to step out for some fresh air. The streets were empty except for one car speeding down the street I was about to cross. I briefly thought that if I timed my steps just right, I could “accidentally” get hit. No no, not so badly I would die (though that didn’t scare me), but just a little. Like, just enough that I’d have to be in the hospital for a minute. At least it would be quiet there, right? And I wish I could write about just one specific memory when I felt completely inadequate to mother Theo, but those feelings haunted me every hour of every day for months. So at 5 weeks in, how do I even respond to a perfectly innocent yet totally loaded question like, “So do you love being a mom?” I wasn’t upset that she asked; we can’t expect strangers to anticipate and appropriately react to our internal struggles. But this question killed me. My husband explained it REALLY well: asking me this at 5 weeks in is like asking someone who just quit their job to start a business if it was worth it. How could you possibly know the answer to that yet?! It’s barely even begun! If the answer to that question isn’t 100% positive, you’d never respond honestly because that question is never “just a question.” You always hear longing in people’s voices when they ask about the newborn days. They talk about how magical they are and how much you’ll miss them, but I wish someone told me that it’s not the newborn days that put the longing in their voice now; it’s who that newborn becomes that makes them ache to relive the beginning. The semi-sentient potato that does nothing but eat, cry, and poop doesn’t feel like the same person you fall in love with a few months later when they flash their toothless grin and reach up to you from their tiny bed. I’m sure it’s true the newborn days are the highlight for some people, but they were very dark for me. Well, for both my husband and I, but I’m speaking only from my perspective here. The brutal lack of sleep, 24/7 breastfeeding, and brain-rattling baby screams chipped away at my sanity and depression snuck up on me before I even knew what happened. The fourth trimester is difficult for anyone, but for first few months of my baby’s life, I sincerely thought I ruined my own. What really did me in? Well, Theo was a crier. In medical terms, he had colic. WHAT IS COLIC LIKE? “…frequent, prolonged and intense crying or fussiness in an otherwise healthy infant.” Contrary to popular belief, it is not gas and it is not reflux. And if you’re thinking, “well, babies cry!” Also, no. It’s true that an average baby sometimes cries for seemingly no reason. It’s just their way of coping with a new environment so there’s always a little of that regardless of the baby. A colicky baby cries at least 3 hours a day, at least 3 days a week, for at least 3 consecutive weeks. Our baby cried almost every waking minute every day of his life until he was nearly 4 months old, at an intensity that was so alarming, our nerves were shot before sunrise daily. We were jittery and drained 24/7 and that’s not an exaggeration. Newborns have the type of cry that’s supposed to make you jump into action. It’s piercingly high and shockingly loud. Fun fact: newborn cries reach 130 decibels, which is as loud as a machine gun. The threshold for pain is 120 decibels and normal conversation is about 50 decibels. The reason for this intensity is biological, it’s smart, and it’s how they’d survive if abandoned. But to hear it on loop for hours and hours, day after day, while being told nothing is wrong by every doctor you visit, and it’s just something to endure? That’s a special kind of torture we were not ready for. We went to 3 different pediatricians, convinced something was wrong, but everyone said the same thing: He’s perfectly healthy, it’s just “developmental,” “it’s colic.” And everyone we spoke to said, “it goes away by 3 months. Hang in there! Three months!” So when we hit that magical 3 month mark and almost nothing changed, you can imagine how much deeper I slid into the quicksand that is depression. It was more of the same… Theo would wake up, have a few minutes of peacefulness, then quickly melt down into unstoppable crying for hours, or until the next time we could get him to sleep (which was another struggle I’ll go into in its own post). During one of my desperate Google searches […]
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My Experience with Postpartum Depression was first posted on March 20, 2020 at 5:34 am.
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